Arm the Passengers:

The recent controversy over arming airline pilots against a
possible repetition of the 9/11 atrocity misses a crucial problem that
makes arming pilots relatively ineffective: terrorists would know in
advance where the guns are, and be able to game against that.

Let's say you are a terrorist executing a hijacking. You know the pilots
are armed. Then here are your tactics -- you send the pilots a message that
you will begin shooting cabin crew and passengers, one every five minutes,
until the pilots throw their guns into the main cabin. Just to make sure,
you split your gang into an A team and a B team. After the pilots have
thrown out some guns, you send the A team into the cockpit. If the pilots
resist, the B team kills more people.

Sky marshals can be taken out in a similar way. Your B team, armed
with knives, breaks cover and announces the hijacking. The sky
marshals (if there are any present; they're now flying on less than 1%
of planes, and can't be trained fast enough for that figure to go up
significantly in the foreseeable future) break cover. Now your A
team, armed with guns, breaks cover and disposes of the sky marshals.
Game over.

Anyone who thinks either scenario can be prevented by keeping
firearms off-board should put down that crack pipe now.
Tiger team exercises after 9/11 have repeatedly
demonstrated that the new, improved airport security has had
effectively zero impact on a determined bad-guy's ability to sneak
weapons past checkpoints -- it's still easy. Despite government spin,
there is no prospect this will change; the underlying problem is just
too hard.

For terrorists to be effectively deterred, they need to face a
conterthreat they cannot scope out in advance. That's why the right
solution is to arm the passengers, not just the pilots.

Now, as a terrorist, you would be facing an unknown number of guns
potentially pointed at you from all directions. Go ahead; take that
flight attendant hostage. You can't use her to make people give up
weapons neither you nor she knows they have. You have to assume
you're outnumbered, and you dare not turn your back on
anyone, because you don't know who might be packing.

The anti-gun bien pensants of the world wet their pants at
the thought of flying airplanes containing hundreds of armed
civilians. They would have you believe that this would be a sure
recipe for carnage on every flight, an epidemic of berserk yahoos
blowing bullet holes through innocent bystanders and the cabin walls.
When you ask why this didn't happen before 1971 when there were no
firearms restrictions on airplanes, they evade the question.

The worst realistic case from arming passengers is that some gang
of terrorist pukes tries to bust a move anyway, and innocent
bystanders get killed by stray bullets while the passengers are taking
out the terrorists. That would be bad -- but, post-9/11, the major
aim of air security can no longer be saving passenger lives. Instead,
it has to be preventing the use of airplanes as weapons of mass
destruction. Thus: we should arm the passengers to save the lives of
thousands more bystanders on the ground.

And, about that stray-bullet thing. Airplanes aren't balloons.
They don't pop when you put a round through the fuselage. A handful
of bullet holes simply cannot leak air fast enough to be dangerous;
there would be plenty of time to drop the plane into the troposphere.
To sidestep the problem, encourage air travelers to carry fragmenting
ammunition like Glaser rounds.

Think of it. No more mile-long security lines, no more obnoxious
baggage searches, no more women getting groped by bored security
guards, no more police-state requirement that you show an ID before
boarding, no more flimsy plastic tableware. Simpler, safer, faster
air travel with a bullet through the head reserved for terrorists.

Extending this lesson to other circumstances, like when we're
not surrounded by a fuselage, is left as an exercise for
the reader...

posted by Eric at 6:05 AM

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Teen Sex vs. Adult Resentment:

A wise and cynical friend of mine once described the motivation
behind puritanism as "the fear that someone might be fucking and
getting away with it". I think the subtext of the periodic public
panics about teen sex has always been resentment that sexy young
things just might be getting away with it -- enjoying each others'
bodies thoughtlessly, without consequences, without pregnancy, without
marriage, without "meaningful relationships", without guilt, without
sin.

The traditional rationalizations for adult panic about teen sex are
teen pregnancy and STDs. But if teen pregnancy really had much to do
with adult panic, anti-sex rhetoric would have changed significantly
after reliable contraception became available. It hasn't. Similarly,
we don't hear a lot of adult demand for STD testing in high schools.
No; something else is going on here, something more emotional and
deeper than pragmatic fears.

Conservatives and liberals alike are attached to the idea that sex
ought to be controlled, be heavy, have consequences. The
Judeo-Christian tradition of repression, which yokes sex to marriage
and reproduction, is still powerful among conservatives. Liberals have
replaced it with an ethic in which sex is OK when it is harnessed to
building relationships or personal growth or therapy, but must always be
undertaken with adult mindfulness.

Both camps are terrified of mindless sex, of hedonism, of the pure
friction fuck. Lurking beneath both Judeo-Christian and secularized
taboos is a fear that too much pleasure will damn us -- or reduce us
to the status of animals, so fixated on the drug of orgasm that we
will become unfit for marriage and society and adult
responsibility. What has not changed beneath contingent worries about
pregnancy and STDs is the more fundamental fear that pleasure
corrupts.

And beneath that fear lurks something uglier -- the envy that dare
not speak its name. The unpalatable truth is that a teenager's
"immature" hormone-pumped capacity to have lots of mindless sex makes
adults jealous. The conscious line is that the kids have got
to be stopped before they have more sex than is good for them -- the
unconscious line is that they've got to be stopped before they have
more fun than we can stand.

Thus the curious sense of relief that lurks behind a lot of the
propaganda about the dangers of AIDS, even the version of it retailed
by lifestyle liberals. Being able to tell the kids that they shouldn't
casually fuck around because it will kill them feels good; it neatly
rationalizes our resentment of their capacity for pleasure.

But resentment makes for lousy morality just as surely as it makes
for lousy politics. It prevents us from forming rational strategies
to avoid the bad side-effects of teen sex, mires us in denial and
cant. The real issue here is not the teens' experience but our envy
of their youth, innocence, and sexual capacity. And don't think the
kids don't sense this!

Teenagers, whatever their other failings, are keenly attuned to the
smell of adult hypocrisy; they can tell when our stated reasons for
telling them to keep their pants zipped are just cover, even when they
lack the experience to understand what's really bothering us. By
bullshitting them, we forfeit our own moral authority. We damage our
ability to intervene when the kids really do have to be
protected from their impulses.

There may be good reasons to stop teens from screwing each other
with the avidity that nature intended. But we adults won't be able to
focus on those, or make a case for them that is honest and persuasive,
until we stop kidding ourselves about why teen sex makes us panic.
Until we face our sexual fears and resentments squarely, the
kids won't listen. And, arguably, shouldn't listen.

UPDATE: Dean Esmay has written a
thoughtful response
that nevertheless misses the point. I was not arguing a libertine position in the above;
I was addressing the psychology of panic about teen sex, not its morality.
The morality would be a whole different discussion.

posted by Eric at 6:45 AM

Sunday, May 26, 2002

Arm and Assimilate:

A current Weekly Standard article,
Crime Without Punishment, observes that European crime rates are
soaring to levels that match or exceed the U.S.'s even while U.S crime
rates decline for the tenth consecutive year. Schadenfreude
is not a pretty emotion, but it's hard not to feel a twinge of it
after so many years of listening to snotty Europeans lecture us
Americans on how U.S. crime rates demonstrate that we are a nation of
violent barbarians who can be saved only if we swallow European social
policies entire.

The article proposes as an explanation that local control of
policing is more effective than Europe's system of large centralized
police agencies. This may well be true; in fact, it probably is true.
But it fails to explain the time variance -- because that structural
difference is not new, but the flipover in relative crime rates
between the U.S. and Europe is recent.

If that's not what is going on, what is? The article passes over
two potential explanations far too quickly. One: differences in
patterns of civilian firearms ownership. Two: the novel presence of
large unassimilated minority groups in European cities.

The article correctly notes that "John Lott has shown that greater
gun ownership reduces crime" but then dismisses this with "gun
ownership levels are about the same as they were when crime hit its
all-time highs in America 30 years ago". However, the
distribution of firearms has changed in relevant ways. As
Gary Kleck noted ten years ago, the composition of the U.S. firearms
stock in the early 1970s was dominated by rifles and shotguns.
Nowadays it is dominated by pistols. Americans, aided by a recent
state-level trend towards right-to-carry laws, are packing concealed
weapons on the street in greater numbers than ever before -- and those
are the weapons known to have the most dramatic effect in suppressing
crime. Indeed, one of the principal results of Lott's regression
analysis is that encouraging civilians to carry concealed is both a
cheaper and a more effective way to deter crime than increasing police
budgets.

The article dismisses immigration with "violence and theft have
also spiked in countries that let in few immigrants". Again, there is
an issue of distribution here. American experience tells us that it
is not the absolute number of unassimilated poor that matters, but the
extent to which they are concentrated in subsidized ghettos with
little contact with the mainstream and no incentive to assimilate.
After the repeated news stories observing that skyrocketing crime in Paris
is largely a phenomenon of Arab thug-boys from bleak government-run
housing projects, this should not be a difficult concept to grasp.

What's new in Europe is not comparatively poor policing, but rather
the combination of two trends: laws disarming civilians and the
formation of persistent, crime-breeding ghetto cultures analogous to
the U.S.'s urban underclass. Both trends are clearest in Great
Britain, where violent assaults and hot burglaries have shot up 44%
since handguns were banned in 1996, and police now find they have to
go armed to counter gangs of automatic-weapon-wielding thugs in the
slum areas of Manchester and other big cities.

The prescription seems clear: arm and assimilate. Arm the victims
before they become victims and assimilate the criminals before they
become criminals. Raising the frequency of civilian concealed carry
of firearms will deter crime, just as it does in the U.S.
Assimilating the new wave of poor Third-World immigrants and breaking
up the ghettos will drain the stagnant pools in which crime
breeds.

And the next Euro-snob to lecture me on how America's "gun culture"
causes crime is going to get both barrels of this prescription right
in his face...

UPDATE: A reader points out that I was inexplicit about what has led to the formation of
a ghettoized underclass in Europe's cities. It is, of course, the same blunder that started the
same process in American cities forty years ago -- the social-welfare state, subsidizing
poverty.